Commons:Bibliothèque nationale de France

The Bibliothèque nationale de France is the National Library of France. Its mission is to constitute collections, especially the copies of works published in France that must, by law, be deposited there, conserve them, and make them available to the public. It is the most important library in France, and one of the most important in the world.

In April 2010, Wikimédia France signed an agreement with the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The library donated ~1,400 digitised public domain works, taken from its digital library Gallica, so they can be proofread by contributors to Wikisource.

Wikimédia France retrieved in late April image files in TIFF format and OCRs. A team of three volunteers of Wikimédia France worked to transform them into DjVu format that can be used on Wikisource.

The DjVu files were loaded on Commons by a system administrator of the Foundation on July 10 2010. The books index were initialised by bot on Wikisource the same day.

In August, the team worked to make use of the original TIFF files. As the images are heavily compressed during the production of the DjVu, the original files are of far better quality. The TIFF files were uploaded on Commons on August 25 2010. Moreover, the OCR files provided by the BnF indicate the presence of graphical elements detected during the scanning. Using this information, the team managed to automatically extract more than 22000 files. Stored for the moment on the toolserver, these illustrations will be made available to the Wikisource proofreaders so they can more easily reproduce the original layout. Some of the illustrations can also be of interest for example for Wikipedia articles. The team is currently looking into sorting the files and making them available to the community.